


The Naming of Parts

by glasscaskets



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Backstory, F/M, Gen, Gratuitous Russia, Howard Stark - Freeform, Hurt/Comfort, Minor Pepper Potts/Tony Stark, Names, Natasha-centric, Post-Avengers (2012), Religion, Tony Stark Has A Heart, Tony Stark-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-12
Updated: 2016-04-12
Packaged: 2018-06-01 18:32:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6531307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glasscaskets/pseuds/glasscaskets
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On Ellis Island, in May of 1897, just weeks before the entire wooden edifice of the First Immigration Station burned to the ground, Tony’s grandfather opted to keep his name. Over a century and no end of miracles and disasters later, Tony considers the spaces between. </p>
<p>OR: Tony and Nat, at the end of Iron Man 2 and the end of Avengers, taking stock.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Naming of Parts

**Author's Note:**

> “They call it easing the Spring: it is perfectly easy  
> If you have any strength in your thumb: like the bolt,  
> And the breech, and the cocking-piece, and the point of balance,  
> Which in our case we have not got; and the almond-blossom  
> Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and forwards,  
> For to-day we have naming of parts.”
> 
> -Henry Reed, “The Naming of Parts,” from “Lessons of the War”

On Ellis Island, in May of 1897, just weeks before the entire wooden edifice of the First Immigration Station burned to the ground, Tony’s grandfather opted to keep his name. In a land where no shortage of Poles and Czechs traded Kowalczyk and Kovář for _Smith_ , and were even more Geldwässers and Eselkopf’s all too willingly shed their names, Mykola Sokolnikov turned down the generously offered _Nickol_ and headed to the new world bravely.

It would not be until the late ’30s that Mykola’s son, Anatoly, would begin to to style himself as Howard Stark. Turning _Sokolnikov_ into _Stark_ was American bootstraps-pulling in action, in one brilliant stroke shedding Jewishness and immigrant status alike, bravely calling to mind cleanliness and sparks of brilliant with a name like Stark. Where the enterprising young Anatoly got _Howard_ is another question entirely. Tony thought he probably named himself after Howard Hughes. 

Tony didn’t actually know any of this until 1998, when a hefty and, according to no fewer than eight national publications of some merit, definitive biography of Steve Rogers was published by a fanatic or academic--Tony wasn’t entirely sure there was a difference--named Elizabeth Maxwell. In her exhaustive rundown of the perilously short life of Steven Grant Rogers, she found time to detail the early life and some sampling of the family politics of young Steven’s friend-cum-engineer (or was it the other way?), Howard Stark. The book was called _An American Life_ , and the chapter that outed Tony’s father as a rogue Ukrainian Jew was called “The Scientist, New York City, 1916 - 1939,” and it was in Part I. It covered Howard’s life from his parents’ unrelentingly depressing beginnings in some Eastern European cesspool to his involvement in the 1939 World’s Fair. The fair, incidentally, was where Tony’s knowledge of his father’s history began. 

Tony had been tempted to call Elizabeth Maxwell and ask her where she got this shit--Howard told him he was born in Indiana--but her sources were troublingly legitimate, and photograph the little boy purported to be a very young Anatoly Sokolnikov, son of Mykola and Yelena, with his jaw set and his eyebrows unflatteringly intense, was frustratingly reminiscent both of Howard and of Tony at the same age.

So, Tony’s father had been dead for eight years before Tony discovered that he was named for the man. He’d always thought it was for his great-uncle Antonio. That’s what Mom said. Probably also what Howard told her, the narcissistic bastard. _Anatoly Sokolnikov. Antonio Carbonell._ At the end result, the inoffensively American and slick _Tony Stark_. A brand name, in point of fact.

All this was bubbling in Tony’s head as he picked through Natalie Rushman’s Stark Industries employment papers. Her cover was perfect, which meant it was boring as hell. Good spies were tedious as all fuck to read about until they were dead.

So Tony was left to consider the space between _Natalie Rushman_ and _Natalia Romanoff_ , and how much bigger or smaller it was than that between Anatoly and Howard. If she was lucky, she had more of Natalia left then Howard had of Anatoly.

Although, Tony considered, if she was at Nick Fury’s beck and call and as Russian as _Romanoff_ sounded, maybe she’d left something far worse.

He pulled out his phone, found her name. _Are you really a Romanov?_

The text would go unanswered, he was sure, so he added: _Are you Princess Anastasia?_

He tossed the phone on top of Natalie Rushman’s W-12 and the legal pad where he’d written down everything he could recall Fury and Natalie--Natalia? Natasha? damn these Russians with the endless diminutives--saying about the Avengers Initiative. Let Nata-whoever fire back if she wanted.

 

Clint was disappointed by the lack of caviar. Apparently, when he pictured Nat playing personal assistant to Tony Stark, he’d mostly pictured orgies and caviar consumed like breakfast cereal, which was extra funny, because on the two occasions he’d had the opportunity to eat it, Clint hadn’t liked caviar one bit.

“How can you not like it?” Nat had said. “It’s cream and salt.”

“A little fishy embryos,” Clint had replied, disgusted, and Hill had snapped at them to stop crowding up the com line.

But now, some years later, Clint was deeply disappointed to learn Tony Stark and his inner circle did not eat caviar off spoons made of mother of pearl and/or smeared over supermodels’ titties every night. He was equally disappointed to learn that Tony Stark’s inner circle consisted of his other assistant, his driver, and a pilot he’d met in undergrad, and not, for example, a cabal of the most powerful businessmen, politicians, and CEOs in the Western world, plotting together and drinking champagne out of pure diamond glasses while they arranged wars and coups.

“Did you think I was going undercover with the Illuminati?” Nat asked, in some seriousness, twisting an Oreo apart and setting the two halves on each of her knees.

She was sitting cross-legged, leaning against the cabinets on the floor of Clint’s kitchen, shoulder-to-shoulder and splitting a package of Oreos, debriefing.

“No,” said Clint. “Maybe.”

“Well, I hate to break it to you, but Tony Stark is neither an Illuminati high priest nor a prominent Freemason.”

“Well, der’mó,” Clint sighed, “that’s just boring.”

Nat made a face. “Your accent makes me want to stick an ice pick in my ear until I die,” she told him, seriously.

“Thanks,” he said.

When Nat first met Clint, his name sounded too clipped and glinty to be real. He’d called her _Nat-a-lee-a_. Her English was wooden and his Russian was clunky and bad to the point of being often incomprehensible. They both had the bad habit of thinking in one language, then translating to the other. It made everything slow and ugly, obviously foreign, terrifically unbeautiful.

“Streets in America,” Nat had said, lying on a lifeless, musty bed in an anonymous, filthy hooker hotel, still in Moscow, but after they fought, and after she tried to break his neck, and after the particularly protruding muzzle of his Beretta M9 left a perfect questioning _o_ dug into the sweating skin at the back of her neck, after he told her in America they forgive anything if you come bearing information, after the first pleasant shower she could remember and after he lent her an enormous jersey to sleep in and let her take the bed.

The hotel, really, had been grand once; its cramped hallways and the twisty iron railings that hugged teetering, tiny balconies betrayed its pre-revolution aesthetics as well as its mouldering rug in the lobby and the dirty glass cut to look like diamonds dangling from the light fixtures spoke of hard times. Now, the floors groaned and somewhere above them a woman was shouting back and forth with a man; somewhere else, another girl moaned so rhythmically she just sounded tired. There had been a capless hypodermic needle in the bathroom drawer. Nat had pocketed it, just in case.

“Yes,” Clint had said, from the floor. “Da. Streets. Ooh, uh, ulitsa. In America. We have those.”

Nat had felt the flimsy plastic barrel of the needle, flush against her right wrist, hidden by Clint’s scratchy sweater and the only thing she had on under it. If he tried anything, it would be waiting for him along with that which nature gave her--she could dig it into his eye, or else pretend it contained something infinitesimal but deadly. _You want ospa, agent?_ She couldn’t remember the English word for the disease. She’d bluffed worse. The tip was at risk of poking into her fingers or palm; she’d have to be careful.  

“Streets are pretty universal, I think,” Clint said.

“I know,” she’d replied, annoyed as much that she’d had to pause to parse out what _universal_ meant as that he thought she was stupid. “And. And ulitsa is only one street. You having, you have only one street, in America?” 

Clint laughed. “No,” he said, “we have at least two or three. Dva ili tri.”

“And have, streets, streets have panels of gold?” she’d fired back, trying to see him in the dark.

“ _What_?” 

“Streets! Golden streets. Panel in gold, in America.”

Clint had busted out laughing, his voice arcing to match the moaning girl for a moment. Nat had sat up, drawn up her legs under the sweater. Kept the needle close.

“ _Paved_ ,” he’d told her. “Streets paved with gold. But they’re not. Net. Ne-yet. They’re paved with pavement.” He paused. “But, you know. Still defect.”

She’d lain back down, then, watching for his silhouette to straighten up in the dark, but he stayed down, too. Did he really trust her? Or doubt her? 

She’d stayed alert with the needle for another hour yet, until the room was long since full of Clint’s light snores, after she’d counted them and counted them again to try and see if he was really sleeping. Only when the hotel was utterly silent did she tuck the needle under her pillow and go to sleep.

 

When the Oreos were gone she dug out one of her phones and found two messages from Tony, playing with _Romanoff_ and _Romanov_. She never replied, because the depressing truth was she had no idea what her family name was.

Almost a year later, in a helicopter over Stuttgart, shortly after she discovered Captain America’s penchant for leaping out of planes without parachutes, Tony hijacked her chopper’s speaker systems with a gleeful, “Agent Romanoff. Miss me?”

The stupid thing was, she had.

 

After Tony vanished into and fell back out of the sky, and after he’d dragged his dazed and exhausted team mates to a collapsing shawarma joint and offered the staff huddled in terror inside a cool $6,000 to feed them all, Natasha had discovered the following things in the following order.

First, this was kind of just a normal day for Thor.

Second, she could guess from the way he splayed himself over the table and wriggled his eyebrows at her, getting out into the field so quickly had been a balm for Clint’s battered heart and throbbing head like nothing else could have been.

Third, Steve was asleep.

And fourth, Tony had just fallen out of a rip in the space-time continuum and his response to this was to buy six orders of shawarma for $28.19 and some peace and quiet for $5,971. And eighty-one cents. She wondered where Pepper was.

Sometime later, after Bruce and Clint had convinced Steve to come back to the blasted-out tower so somebody could look at his injuries, and Tony had distractedly announced they could all stay as long as they needed, after Thor fluttered off to find what SHIELD was doing with Loki--not, in truth, a problem, ethical or logistical, Natasha felt prepared to let into her head just now--and Bruce and Steve retired to get some sleep and Tony flitted away to babble and drink and possibly even have life-affirming sex with Pepper, Nat was on a couch on the tower’s undamaged lower floors, staring at CNN without taking anything in, Clint’s head in her lap. He was finally asleep. Nat’s leg was propped up on the coffee table which, it had taken her some time to work out, was a near-lifesize model of Han Solo frozen in carbonite. No caviar for Tony, but this appeared to be really happening.

She felt someone at the door more than she heard it, and she turned to shush them, whoever they were, bringing the hand that wasn’t resting easily in Clint’s hair to her lips. It was Tony.

“I think we’re the only ones awake,” he said lightly, coming over and sitting down next to Han Solo’s metal, partially submerged leg. He nods at Clint and says, “He okay?”

“Long day,” said Nat, equally light, and Tony nodded, uncharacteristically subdued.

“Are you and him in love?” Tony asked, very suddenly, eyes on her hand buried in Clint’s yellow straw hair.

She blinked, looked at him and he met her eyes, shrugs a little, guileless, as if the question he asked wasn’t childish and intrusive and impossible. _Love is for children_ , she’d told Loki, only a few hours ago, maybe technically yesterday now, and that was a long-rehearsed line. _Lyublyu_ , love; she’d been generous in her translation of “children,” or perhaps just adhering to an old, clunky one from many years ago. The word she remembered was probably better rendered as _tykes_ , or maybe _mutts_.

“Do you believe that?” Clint asked her, once.

“That doesn’t matter,” she’d replied, and that was one of the times they were on adjoining gurneys, waiting for the tide of morphine to rise, knowing they wouldn’t get it until Coulson got the answers he needed about why they were singed or scraped or broken. Their wrists had bumped together, their fingers had found each other, and later, unstrapped from their gurneys and debriefed and medicated, he’d planted four tiny kiss-hickeys like crocus blooms along her left collarbone, and she’d craned upwards to kiss him on the mouth, not for the first time but with a fullness and a determination that had her hoping he would leave more bruises on her. Instead, he opened his mouth against hers, kissed back in hopeful little snatches, drew away to kiss her temple and eyelids and hair.

“I think you’re my soulmate,” he told her, in the dark, in their hospital gowns, and she liked that, that wherever else they went their bodies were machines, coiled with intent to find one another again, to slot together like toys.

_Are you and him in love?_

“Who knows,” she said, and Tony cracked a grin, ran his hands restlessly over the stupid table--and Nat had first seen _Star Wars_ with Clint, of course, and Phil Coulson had been there for _The Empire Strikes Back_ but the reason for that was muddled--and he was so like a child sometimes, with his Han Solo coffee table and his simple questions about love.

Once, when he was dying and she was Natalie, he’d asked her how she’d spent her birthday, if it was going to be her last. She’d given him a coy enough answer--that she’d do whatever she wanted with whoever she wanted to--which probably wasn’t true of her personally, but was also throwing a line to offer Tony Stark a pity fuck, which wasn’t strictly professional but wouldn’t violate any of Nick’s terms. It would be a wonderful intel-gathering opportunity, and probably reasonably interesting to boot. God knew he’d get her anything she wanted for breakfast in the morning.

But he’d said no--actually, he hadn’t even entertained the notion enough to turn her down, and had instead taken her advice as license to throw the kind of party fourteen-year-old boys dreamed of and to almost blow up his own house. None of this was entirely surprising, she supposed, but she really had expected him to try harder to sleep with her.

He gives her a weird knowing look now, still perched on top of an ugly darkened brass model of Harrison Ford, and nodding to them both stood to leave. 

“I’m pretty sure I’m not really a Romanov,” she said, suddenly, and her turned to look at her with a weird little half smile on his face. “Though I don’t know what my surname used to be.”

“Well,” he said, “if you are the grand duchess Anastasia, you’ve aged marvelously.”

She granted him a little smile then. “You know, grand duchesses were somehow not that popular when I was growing up.” 

“You know, that’s surprising to me. In America, we have princesses. In Soviet Russia, you’re telling me the duchesses weren’t the apple of every little girl’s eye?”

“Nah,” she said, “something about imperialist royal pigs.”

“Ah.”

“And you’re an imperialist _capitalist_ pig,” she told him seriously. 

“Guilty as charged,” he said, grinning again. “Get some sleep, Natalia.”

He was gone before she can give him a look for that name.

 

On a train bound for Kiev, alone in the back car and watching the reflections of lights and stars blur together over her own face in the window, she practiced the Western alphabet in her head and wondered what American air would smell like. She’d never left the Union, and she couldn’t help but feel even the colors would be different.

Clint told her lowly that in a few stops they’d change trains, even though they were hundreds of miles from Kiev only had the tickets for this one. He said they’d meet a car as soon as they cleared what would, in only a few months, become the border into Ukraine. “Whatever we do,” he had told her, “act like you knew it was gonna happen.”

“Why they send someone if he has such bad Russian?” she had asked, tearing her eyes from the window.

“I didn’t come to blend in with the locals,” he told her shortly, and it was very dark on the train but she could tell from the way the shining whites of his eyes moved he was looking over her head, out the window.

“For what, ah, why did you come, then?” she’d asked.

“To squash a mean little spider,” he’d said.

This took her a moment-- _squash_ was an uneasy marriage of _square_ and _wash_ that took a minute to translate in her head--but his tone had her dropping her eyes to her hands in her lap. She realized she’d left the needle under the pillow in the ghost hotel, _vy dolboyob, you stupid stupid ass, dolboyob_ \--

“But that would be a waste,” Clint had continued, softly, “uh, a, poteri?”

 “Casualties?”

“Oh,” he’d said. “Da. Something like that. I’m not going to kill you. You’re defecting.”

The word was terrifying, and the crushing weight of what she was doing, of the history she was throwing away, this foolish leap for some _boy_ , was she a child, was she an idiot, they would cut off her eyelids when they found her, they would tear her to pieces in America, she was throwing away a lifetime for this, she was a worthless traitorous child--

“Nat-a-lee-a,” Clint had said, firmly, “listen, hey. It’s okay. It’s, hey, uh, rash-o, rush-o, rush-ho, it’s okay.”

She blinked, furious to find herself tearful, and told herself she had an upper hand. Nobody in America could guess how powerful a Black Widow graduate could be; nobody knew how much information she held. She didn’t know how much information she held. They didn’t need to know that.

He sat with her, shoulder to shoulder, until they crept off the train and onto another, this one carrying cargo, and only as dawn broke and they waited against a low farm wall somewhere just west of Kharkiv, that she said, “You say my name _Natalia_.”

“Not-all-ye-uh,” he’d replied, not looking at her, and she’d stared, appalled, before he grinned, apologetic and sheepish, before peeking his head back over the wall they were sitting against, watching for something Nat would only pretend to recognize.

“Tell you what,” she said, borrowing a phrase he’d used with her a few times already, “you call me Natasha.”

“Okay, Natasha,” he’d replied, meeting her eyes again. “Welcome to your new life.”

 

Math and some borrowed intel from his sneaky SHIELD decryption told Tony Natasha defected from the Soviet Union only a few months before it ceased to be, which gave her plenty of time to scrub her accent and her record clear before she sauntered into his life. He wondered how many names she shuffled through between Natalia No-Name and Natalie Rushman; he wonders if any of them felt any realer than the next. He wonders, if she’d been the child of Mykola and Yelena Sokolnikov, if she’d have shrugged that name off as easily as an overcoat, slinked into something more like a smoking jacket and an accent-less, blandly Protestant _Howard Stark_.

He wonders, likewise, if it matters; if he could really be named for his father when Howard abandoned that name so swiftly, left Anatoly a ghost caught forever between pages of fat biographies, or perhaps strewn or lying in the same empty road Natalia tramped down when she snuck out of the USSR with Agent Barton. Perhaps there was no more truth or consequence in the shedding of Jewish or enemy-of-the-state names than there was in the fluid journey from Antonio to Anthony to Tony. 

He stood in the doorway to the tenth-floor TV room, turning all the information he’d so far read from SHIELD’s files over in his head, trying not to listen to the news or to the persistent, ugly-irregular thumping of his own ragged heart. He looked at the back of Nat’s head, haloed by the fuzzy blue from the enormous TV, and thought of Pepper upstairs, asleep, hopefully, still, in the bed that had made the surprisingly smooth journey from _his_ to _theirs_ in the late spring. 

Whatever was lost, Tony figured as he left Nat and Clint piled on the sofa, was still on the road where they dropped it, the Sokolnikovs and Romanoffs and Carbonells and Rogerses and Starks. Somebody could always go back and get it.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Der’mó is Russian for “shit.”  
> Dva ili tri. “Two or three.”  
> [The Han Solo coffee table is very real.](http://nerdist.com/han-solo-carbonite-coffin-coffee-table/)  
> Dolboyob means “stupid ass.”  
> “Ospa” is Russian for smallpox.  
> The word Clint is trying to say when he says “rash-o” is khorosho, meaning “alright” or “o.k.”


End file.
